


So There's  A Dead Boy on the Porch

by lilyeverlasting



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Angst with a Happy Ending, Background Relationships, Derek & Emily friendship, M/M, Original Character(s), POV Alternating, Plot Twists, Slow Build, Teen!Derek, The Hale Fire took everyone, Werewolves, derek is a ghost, mentions of frontotemporal dementia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-03-01 09:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2768111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyeverlasting/pseuds/lilyeverlasting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone knows it's lonely being dead, but Derek Hale is fine with being alone, and everyone leaves him alone anyway. Maybe that's because Derek is an angry, broody little shit-but that's okay with him. The afterlife is an interesting and not so interesting place, and Derek watches it all from his front porch: the lonely ghosts, the angry ghosts, the grumpy old cat lady who can't remember she's dead, a priest who can't let go of the past, the idiots from Beacon Hills High who try to break into his house for a scare, and the peculiar boy Derek one day finds sitting on his porch.</p><p>And no one - NO ONE- sits on Derek Hale's porch.</p><p>Or, the one where Derek and Stoop Kid might have too much in common, and Stiles is friends with the cat lady.  An afterlife AU with werewolf ghosts, a mysteriously always missing cat named Kristofferson, and a boy who helps another boy realize the afterlife isn't just about being a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The House

**Author's Note:**

> None of the archive warnings applied. This fic will have no explicit sex, no detailed acts of violence, and no major or abrupt character death during the course of the fic that hasn't already been established as in the past. There IS foul language. There IS Greenberg. hehe. There IS (slow-build) Sterek and it is the main pairing. Stiles and Derek are not immediately introduced, and the different POVs are for plot reasons.

 

The loneliest nights in Beacon Hills began with a house on a road so quiet and bare, Route 49 had forgotten what it was like to have someone turn left at the stop sign instead of driving past it like most rational people with places to go. But that was just what the Ford Explorer at the intersection did. It turned left.

It wasn’t a secret that no one actually went down the road through the forest preserve; least of all at midnight on a Thursday, unless you just so happened to be a member of the Beacon Hills High Lacrosse team. In which case, if you were, you would have found yourself crammed into a 1990 white Ford Explorer creeping up the asphalt, hugging the side of the one-lane road local hikers liked to pretend didn’t exist, that stop sign and rationality long gone some five or six miles ago. And, if you were so unfortunate as to be a member of that Lacrosse team from Beacon Hills High in that Ford Explorer on that Thursday night, and if you were even more unfortunate as to be a boy named Dale Greenberg, you were very unfortunate indeed. And that wasn’t just because Dale Greenberg was a name Dale Greenberg hated himself because he’d been named after his mother’s favorite fictional cowboy instead of something ordinary and Jewish (he doubted bad things happened to Jewish boys with ordinary Jewish names).

Dale not-so-secretly believed he was the unluckiest little bastard Beacon Hills had ever seen next to his uncle Alec Greenberg (may he rest in peace), and Dale was beginning to wonder if this was like the opening to every cheap horror or murder mystery he’d ever watched. But, that was just the nerves talking. Maybe.

Dale Greenberg wasn’t someone who just went traipsing through haunted forests at night, especially with his Greenberg luck, without having left a quick note (under his copy of 1984)  telling his mother where he actually went (not Connor Weir’s to spend the night. Lydia Martin was throwing a party after midnight), if for some reason, he didn’t come home and his luck played out just like Uncle Alec’s had. And if all went well and he did go home tomorrow morning, he’d cleaned his room as a sort-of apology in case his mother got nosy and actually found his note.

“Dude,” laughed Connor, elbowing Dale in the side and not taking his eyes off the trees, “this is some fucking Chainsaw Massacre shit.”

Dale hoped it wasn’t. So did Connor, but Connor wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know that.

The road that cut through the forest preserve off of Route 49 wound down the trees like a tongue, farther, and deeper, until the sign for the highway and the gates to the preserve slowly disappeared from the rear view mirror and it seemed like the wood might have swallowed them whole. This feeling is always worse at night, when the back roads sleep and you can’t hear the world outside of the trees and the narrow road doesn’t bend, or fork, or go in any other direction but straight ahead for miles.

The farther the boys drove down that black throat, the more restless they became. They drew their letterman jackets closer to their chests as if the red from the leather might seep into their skin and give them that cocky bravado everyone loved so much during a game.

No one in Beacon Hills took a haunted place lightly.

The Explorer squeaked down the road. Andy, the one dumb enough to be driving a 1990 Ford Explorer filled with sort-of drunk teenage Lacrosse boys at midnight in a haunted forest preserve,  really needed to get that fixed. The car inched closer, and closer, so slowly the owls were beginning to watch. And who wouldn’t stop whatever it was they were doing to watch.  It looked like a clown car, stuffed with so many red jackets and jocks and would-be jocks and faces pressed up against windows, hoping, and dreading, that the house down the road was actually as haunted as everyone said it was.

Through a break in the trees, the full moon shone. In the front seat, Jackson Whittemore threw back his blond head and howled, mouth split with a grin. He’d ditched being alone with his very popular, and very beautiful girlfriend, Lydia Martin, before her party for this.  The boys laughed, someone cursed, and someone else elbowed Greenberg in the side again. He was huddled in the corner of the backseat with his right cheek smeared against the glass while the two boys next to him goofed off and pointed out the window.

The house really was some Chainsaw Massacre shit.

It squatted, alone and as dark as the shadows it tried to hide under, in a clearing to the left. The Explorer groaned to a stop. No one moved. No one spoke. Andy kept the headlights on.

“Well? We going in, or what?”

Dale wasn’t sure who said this, because he was too busy staring at the Hale house. It was eerier in person, strange and macabre, and in the night it looked like it had a face. The glassless windows followed each shadow that loped through the yard, and its broken porch grinned like a crooked mouth.

It was the ugliest house Dale had ever seen.

If the Hale house had been pretty once, it had eaten whatever it was about itself that had been friendly until it sat half-digested in the yard. If Dale closed an eye, maybe it even looked like a wart between the trees. The Hale house sagged. It was charred black on some ends, broken in others, caved in on left side of the roof, and crooked all other ways.

Andy turned off the car. The headlights blinked, then went out. Jackson held up a flashlight. He waved the bluish beam of light into the eyes of all the boys in the backseat.

“Alright, boys, this is how it’s gonna go.”

Dale closed his eyes and hoped Uncle Alec would keep his distance in the afterlife.

“New boys go in. You don’t run and you make it out, you don’t have to worry about try-out cuts tomorrow.”

“So, what about McCall?” asked Connor. Miserably, Dale began to realize just how many Lacrosse hopefuls hadn’t thought this little detour to Lydia Martin’s party was necessary.

Why did he always fall for this kind of shit?

Jackson rolled his eyes. “What about McCall?” he mocked. “He’s out.”

“But-”

“He’s _out_. Scott didn’t come. Scott’s out. Can’t hang with the team, can’t hang with us on the field.”

“He’s been weird anyway ever since Stilinksi,” said Andy. There was a moment where no one said anything. No one said anything, Dale knew, because it was true. Strange things happened in Beacon Hills, and Stiles Stilinksi, best friend of the missing Scott McCall and the team’s former hapless teammate, had been no exception.

“Please, he couldn’t make a goal to save his life,” laughed Jackson, “he was never any good, and neither was Stilinski. Now get out.”

A Senior opened the door to his right, and the boys nearly fell out of the car. Dale was jostled and pushed until the car spat him out and he rolled in the dirt. The others laughed and said things like “Don’t be a pussy, Greenberg.”

Everyone always said crap like that. Dale was used to it, he guessed.

“Wait-”

“Make us proud, boys!”

The car doors slammed shut, and suddenly, Andy turned the key in the ignition and spun the car around in a tight u-turn. The headlights blinded Dale for a moment. The others whooped and the radio began to yell. The Explorer squealed as it shot forward into the night. It disappeared long before the calls and cries of the team did.

“Wait! Oh shit! Oh shit!” moaned Jared, a fellow Junior who was never very good with anything that involved stress or peer pressure. Dale knew, because Jared’s “nerves” had ruined the fourth grade Thanksgiving play-the only time in his life Dale had ever been in a play, and the only time Dale had ever been the lead, or number one, in just about anything. Dale took two steps back. He liked his Converse.

Jared mopped the sweat off his nose to keep his glasses from falling before wiping his hands off on his jeans.  “I knew I should have joined Cross Country.” Connor clapped him on the shoulder.

The Explorer was gone, and the “new boys” were left to gawk at the Hale house. Alone.

Dale swallowed hard. “We going?”

No one moved. Jared shook his head. He looked sick. Connor kept looking to the road. The boy behind Dale, Brian, shoved him forward. Brian had pulled up his hood, his pale face nearly white in the dark. He looked freaked.

“Your idea. You go first.”

“Aw, come on, man-” said Connor, who’d snagged Dale’s elbow when he stumbled.

“If you think I’m just gonna go in and-”

“We’ll all go, c’mon.” It was Mason Whatshisname (Dale had no idea what his last name even was, only that he was the good-looking black boy who had it in with Jackson, and his little protégé, Liam, who was Mason’s BFF. Liam hadn't bothered trying to make it; he hadn’t needed to. Dale doubted Mason even needed to “pass” tonight. Mason was a shoe-in, which didn't seem fair, but hey who was asking). Mason took that first step toward the house, hands stuffed in his pockets, determined and unafraid. A real conqueror.

Mason, Dale decided, was pretty damn cool.

Not that he’d ever say that. When you were a Greenberg, everything you really wanted to say had an annoying habit of twisting into something you never meant to say in the first place. The Greenbergs had a curse over their heads, you see.

Just like Uncle Alec.

Mason leaped over the broken steps up to the porch. He leaned on the railing, sweeping a glance over the front yard. “Crazy, huh?” he whispered. “The whole family died here-”

Brian had to interrupt. “Dude, what about that girl last year who was murdered on the trail behind the house over there? Yeah, she was sacrificed in some satanic ritual or something. Place’s fucked up. I don’t think they ever caught ‘em either-”

“Yeah, no,” whimpered Jared. “I don’t want to think about it. Can’t we all just say we went in? It’s not like Jackson will ever find out!”

Brian shook his head like he hadn’t heard. “Never caught ‘em. Never caught the psychos who torched this place either. Used to be wolves out here, too.” He gestured loosely at the house with both hands.

Connor said, “My brother Aaron came here once, and he says there’s a bloody hand print in the living room.”

Dale was pretty sure that had to be a lie, but he didn’t say anything.

“Really?” Mason snapped upright and looked back at the front door.  Jared said, “Oh, shit. Oh, _shit_.”

Brian snorted, like it was all a joke, but his voice was too nasally. “Yeah? Well, my sister came here last year for Halloween. She said it sounds like something’s moving upstairs after midnight. Like footsteps.”

“A hobo?” Mason guessed.

“Derek Hale.”

“ _Jesus_ , will you stop?” cried Jared, who looked sicker than anyone had ever seen him. Dale kept his distance. If the fourth grade play had taught him anything, it was to never trust that Jared could keep his stomach.

Mason sighed. “Hey, it’s okay, Jared. You’re alright. You can stay here if you want. No one has to go in if they don’t want to.”

Jared was so relieved he wheezed. “But-Jackson said-”

“Yeah, well, like you said, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. If you don’t want to go in, don’t. But I’m going in.” With a shake of his head, and without another word, Mason cranked open the Hale’s front door. It sighed and screeched. Dale grit his teeth.

He thought of his note under his copy of 1984, and he thought of Jackson Whittemore, and everyone else, laughing, saying “don’t be a pussy, Greenberg.” Part of Dale Greenberg’s unfortunate curse included a lot of the school laughing, or yelling, at him. Usually for things that weren’t his fault but conveniently looked like they were.

Unfortunately.

So maybe it was because he decided to be brave, maybe it was just because Dale was sick of people saying shit like, “don’t be a pussy, Greenberg,”, or maybe he was just plain stupid. Who knew. Dale didn’t think of Uncle Alec, who’d died too young at twenty-two after climbing a water tower on a dare.

Dale didn’t really know why he did it.

“Wait, hold up!” He twisted out of Connor’s grip, who hadn’t let go of his jacket sleeve. Connor didn’t follow him. Before he lost his nerve, Dale hopped up onto the porch, over the broken steps that smiled a crooked grin. Mason turned his head, flicking dark eyes back over his shoulder. He smiled. He smiled in a small way, but it was big enough for Dale to see. Dale smiled too, and without a backward glance, disappeared into the Hale house.

“Never caught ‘em,” said Brian again. The others laughed nervously. Jared groaned like he had a stomach ache.

“Shut the fuck up, Brian,” Connor snapped.

The door to the Hale house hissed shut.

Brian, Jared, and Connor waited exactly twenty-two minutes. Twenty-two was an unlucky number for any Greenberg. Uncle Alec died on his twenty-second birthday after falling twenty-two feet from a water tower. Grandpa Abraham lost an eye to his own .22 long rifle on February 22, 1998. Cousin Rachel broke her foot in twenty-two places after being stepped on by a police horse during a protest on 22nd street in New York. And now, Dale Greenberg had followed a good-looking boy into a haunted house on March 22nd for exactly twenty-two minutes. In those twenty-two minutes, he and Mason joked in low voices. Mason’s elbow kept brushing against his, slowly, then quickly, then slowly again. Dale caught his eye. Once. Twice. Three times. Dale’s fingers twitched. Mason’s knuckles brushed against his thumb like a sigh. Mason’s grin was bright under the full moon. Dale watched Mason’s lips as they talked under the stairs, imagining what it would be like to snare Mason’s bottom lip in his teeth. And that was when something unlucky happened.

**  
  
  
**

* * *

 

It wasn’t Derek Hale’s fault that Dale Greenberg liked flirting in haunted houses. It wasn’t Derek Hale’s fault living people were idiots and thrill seekers. It wasn’t Derek’s fault Greenberg was hit in the head by a rotting piece of whateverthehellitwas that fell from the roof. Not trespassing on rotted-through, condemned, supposedly haunted houses was supposed to be common sense. Greenberg’s breath left his lungs in a surprised _ooof!_ misting in the dark, KO’ed for a few seconds while the other boy, Mason, shouted, “WHAT THE HELL-!”

Derek watched him try to shake Greenberg awake, his voice cracking before he tried to staunch the blood gushing from Greenberg’s poor head with his own t-shirt. Derek watched the kid startle when the stairs began to creak and groan and sigh, even when it seemed there was no one there. And here he’d thought he’d have to watch them make-out before scaring them good.

It also wasn’t Derek Hale’s fault that when Dale Greenberg finally opened his eyes and dazedly looked up at the cold spring sky from the hole in the roof as he lay sprawled on the floor and bleeding, he saw Derek’s sixteen-forever-and-very-dead face watching him over the banister at the top of the stairs.

“Get. Out,” growled Derek.

Dale Greenberg screamed. He screamed and wriggled out of Mason’s touch, all gangly limbs and Converse. He ran lopsidedly through the living room and out the door, stumbling over his own shoelaces. Mason shot after him.

“Hold up! Dale! Your head!”

Headlights flashed, and through the gaping holes in his dead and patched over house, Derek watched a beat-up Explorer brake to a stop at the end of the driveway. Dale Greenberg was still trying to run away, bumping into every corner and obstacle thrown at him like a blind bat left out in the sun.

Derek glowered and trailed after them. Dale noticed and screamed even louder. He smacked face-first into the wall before tumbling out of the front door.

Mason shouted again, waving his phone over his head like it was some sort of cure-all, desperately looking for a signal. Derek slipped through his chest and out again into the night, and the kid dropped his phone, caught in a chill.  The phone’s screen cracked.

“Fuck.”

Derek snarled, “Out.”

The others waiting outside gawked at them. Derek shouted, “Get the hell outta my yard.”  No one heard. No one cared. No one saw Derek Hale. The boys in the car pointed and yelled and laughed. Dale Greenberg finally tripped over his own shoes before one of the boys snapped out of it and tried helping him to his feet.

“Holy shit, Dale, your mom’s gonna kill me.”

It was all very unfortunate. At least, that was what Derek’s mother would have said.

“Holy shit, Greenberg!” jeered some asshole. He jumped out of the driver’s seat to take a closer look.

The jock who’d been in there with Greenberg, Mason, was still talking. “My phone’s all cracked, screen’s glitching out. Jackson!  Drive us to the emergency room-”

“He’s fine,” said their blond ring leader, who was also an asshole.

Mason didn't look convinced. “No, I think he’s got a concussion and he-you know what, whatever, just give me your phone. I’ll call a freakin’ ambulance if I have to-”

Jackson barked out an unimpressed laugh. “Stop freaking out and get Greenberg in the damn car-”

Dale began to babble, clutching his head, eyes too wide and too white. “There’s something in there. Someone. I fucking _mean_ it, man. I fucking mean it. I saw-I saw-shit... am I bleeding...?” And then Dale Greenberg bent over and vomited all over the hood of the getaway car.

“AW MAN, SERIOUSLY GREENBERG? I _JUST_ WASHED IT!”

“Hahaha, shi-it.”

“Wow. He actually beat Jared to it.”

The driver’s door to the Explorer creaked. Someone had left it hanging open. It snapped shut with a squeal. It could have been the wind. The boys stopped laughing. Mason stopped talking. Greenberg stopped heaving. Jackson, the ring leader, glared.

Somewhere near the back of the car, something went thump, and with a bang! the trunk groaned. The boys jumped. The forest was quiet. The Hale house sat, lonely and beaten, in the dark.

Derek waited in the dark. Watched them shake. Tick tock, tick tock. Derek counted to twenty. The longer he waited, he knew, the more afraid they'd become. Derek crunched a stick underfoot. One of the boys whimpered.

Jackson sneered. “Fuck this. Let’s go.” With that, the boys hurried back into the car, vomit on the hood forgotten.

 **  
** Derek watched them run.  
  
  



	2. It's Lonely Being Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, ghosts are angry. Sometimes, they’re sad for reasons long since forgotten, and other times, they’re the irritatingly happy kind.
> 
> Derek Hale was NOT the happy kind.

Everyone knows it’s lonely being dead. It’s grim business. Most of the time. Sometimes, ghosts are angry. Sometimes, they’re sad for reasons long since forgotten, and other times, they’re the irritatingly happy kind.

Derek Hale was _not_ the happy kind.

The Hale house down the road off of Route 49 was still very much alive, even if anyone who didn’t want to believe said the house was long since dead. If you happened to ask a non-believer (there weren’t very many people left in Beacon Hills who hadn’t seen something strange and/or terrifying on a dreary night), they’d probably laugh and tell you there was nothing left to find (nothing you’d want to find, anyone sensible would tell you), unless you wanted a cheap thrill or maybe a concussion. It was one of those eyesores with a tragic past left to rot out in the middle of the woods.

The priest from St. Paul’s Catholic Church called the house a graveyard instead of an eyesore. It was kind of funny, since Father Deaton, and St. Paul’s Catholic Church, had almost burned to the ground three times in the last twenty years (and had burned once). But the Hale house had burned once, and that was all it took.

On the mistiest of mornings, perched on his rotting porch, Derek would watch the priest stroll up the road in black, like a mourner lost on his way to a funeral. Father Deaton would sigh and press his fingers to the crumbling porch to whisper a prayer Derek never heard.

“Why do you even care so much? Does it really matter anymore?” asked Derek once, and he squatted on a step, close enough to see the shine of sunlight reflecting off of the Father’s bald, bald head. Derek thought he knew the answers, but as the days went by, he began to doubt that.

Derek watched Father Deaton closely. Father Deaton never saw Derek Hale.

That’s just how it was.

Sometimes, Derek threw splinters at that brown, bald head. He’d made a game of it. If he hit it just right, right in the little bright circle of sunlight that reflected off his skin on bright days, he got to carve another name on the porch. Today, he kept missing. He hadn’t even nicked the priest’s shoulder. Derek cursed.

Sometimes, when he got bored of the game or trying to scare Deaton off, Derek growled at him. Sometimes he howled. Long, bitter songs that might have once been sweet. Sometimes he shook the beams like a monkey bending branches in the trees. Sometimes Derek got in the Father’s face, hovering too close as he moved, just to watch the prickle and pucker of the older man’s skin out of spite.

“Do you see me yet?”

But the priest never got scared. He never ran away. Never listened, and more importantly, he never saw Derek. Not when Derek got in his face. Not when Derek paced and made the porch creak and sigh. Not when he yelled and shook the window panes like a gust of wind. Not when Derek flipped the priest the bird while he prayed and Derek watched him from his favorite spot on the porch-the corner to the left, where a bit of the roof still held together and afternoon shade pooled beneath it. Derek would sit there, back to the scorched vinyl siding like a surly little boy.

He sat there now like he hadn’t moved in a century. Too many people had breached the Hale’s yard today. Derek aimed another splinter at the priest, but Father Deaton moved at the last second, and Derek missed him by almost a foot.

“Fuck you, Deaton.”

Sometimes Derek talked just to talk.

Deaton never quit the Hale house. Not like the hikers from last month, or the boys from last night. Maybe the old man thought he owed the Hale’s something, had a duty to their dead, since he’d known Talia Hale. Derek knew the stories. How Deaton had watched Talia grow and opened his doors to her when the confessional closed in too tight, unable to keep all her secrets from seeping out from under his feet and pouring down the aisles. When she came to him in the middle of the night, standing under the arched doorway of his parish hall in the light of the full moon, there had been a beauty he’d respected, and some nights even feared. There was a sharp cut to her silhouette, a grim danger in her step. She would appear, and disappear, and always, always, she came for answers, for the right prayers.

And Derek only knew this, because the dead never forgot, and the dead liked to talk.  So did Father Deaton.

Deaton said a prayer.

Derek wasn’t sure he believed in prayers, or anything at all, really. There were days he wasn’t even sure he was really as dead as he thought he was. Deaton turned and shivered. He walked away leaving Derek on the porch. He stopped to pluck a chain of purple flowers that had sprouted again under the steps. The priest stuffed them in his pocket with a frown. But he didn’t look back.

So Derek kicked at the beams holding up the skeleton of his porch. He kicked at the last remaining step until it crumbled. Deaton never looked back. Derek kept waiting to feel it, like Greenberg.

But he never did, and Derek wondered if he’d gone to Hell after all.

* * *

 

If anyone had ever asked Derek Hale if he was lonely, they’d never bothered to ask him again. Probably because Derek was a broody, angry little shit. But that was just how Derek wanted it, so it was all good. Everyone who was anyone (alive or dead)  knew who Derek Hale was, and, if you’d been dead long enough, you would know why.

Every morning began with Derek sitting on his porch. Sometimes, he had a carving knife. There were names etched into the wood like Cora, and Laura, and Talia.

And Kate.

Kate was everywhere. On the porch. In the hall. Sometimes there were jagged lines slashed through the letters. Other times it was just there. On the wall. On the door. On the floor. Kate. Kate. Kate.

Derek hated the name Kate.

Once, he’d covered the dining room table in the name Kate, until there was no table top, just little ravines and canyons. He’d taken a hatchet to it.

That day, he’d been so angry he was everywhere. In the yard, in the basement, in the attic. Everywhere he drifted, and everywhere he looked. And after, after he’d seen it all, he’d carefully picked up each piece of wood he’d chipped away and held it to his chest. He spent his day cleaning up the house, or what little of it that was left. He left the porch-just for the day. He spent too long staring into the deep stainless steel bowl of the kitchen sink. It still had a coffee cup in it. The one that read _My mom is awooo-utstanding!_

That day, Derek had his first visitor.

He’d only been dead for about a week. He knew, because he’d counted. When he first saw Emily walking up the path behind the house, he’d thought she was alive, because she seemed to move instead of glide. He thought she was alive until he threw a rock at her head and it sailed right through.

She smiled. Derek cursed and sat down on his porch.

“I’m Emily,” said Emily when she finally reached the porch. Derek’s head lolled back.

“Aw, man.” He let the back of his head bump into the door two more times.

A ghost needs a little company every now and then. They need someone to pester and haunt. Someone to recount their death to, over and over and over again, of course.

So Emily sat down on the edge of Derek’s porch where the top step might have been once and said, “I was strangled to death on a camping trip and sacrificed for a satanic cult.” She said it as if it was a once-in-a-lifetime-down-on-your-shit coincidence. Or just morbidly funny.

It wasn’t, really.

What was this? Ghosts anonymous?

Derek closed one eye and pretended Emily was gone. But Emily wasn’t gone, and Emily kept talking. “I was in the news, you know. But they used my yearbook picture from junior year. The one where my right eye squints more than my left and I still had braces. Know what sucks more? I was supposed to lose my virginity the night I died. My girlfriend brought candles and everything.” Emily sighed, like it was all terribly romantic, ”And then I died.”

Derek groaned.

“Shitty, right?”

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“But it’s unfair, right?”

“What?”

“That I died a virgin,” said Emily.

Derek opened his other eye and raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Get off my porch.”

Emily blinked at him. “You do know what everyone says about you, right?” When Derek said nothing, she asked, “Is it true you never leave the porch...or the house?”

“Get. Off. My. Porch.”

Then Emily was gone, like smoke ripped apart by the wind, and Derek was alone again.

Not that he minded.

But Emily was sensitive, and Derek still caught her lurking behind the house. She was lonely, he guessed. No one _nice_ ever came by the Hale house. No one ever wanted to. It was just Derek, and Emily. Derek wondered if Emily was the loneliest ghost he’d ever seen. Sometimes he let her drift onto the porch and listened to her talk while he meddled with broken things. Sometimes Derek didn’t see her for weeks-or maybe it was longer than that. He didn’t know anymore, and he’d stopped counting long ago. He guessed he could understand why she left so much, and it wasn’t hard to guess that Emily haunted the curb by her still-alive girlfriend’s home almost as much as she haunted the trail she’d died on behind the Hale house.

A deathbed was hard to leave.

Mornings and too many days passed. Derek didn’t know how long it had been. When you were dead, you only noticed things like seasons when you stopped to think about something other than your non-existence. He’d forgotten, Derek supposed. Forgotten what time was like, and what it did. But one day, Emily seeped through the bubbled up vinyl (she must have been wandering inside the house again), and Derek realized it was spring. Emily materialized on Derek’s porch to say, “I saw my girlfriend today.”

And Derek knew today was going to be a very bad day.

“Hm,” he grunted, and kept sweeping the porch. It had gathered leaves and bird shit. And one abandoned joint.

“She dyed her hair pink.” Today was the kind of day where Emily didn’t bother pretending to walk. She hung in the air, all washed out and gray, like a starched sheet left out in the rain.

Derek sighed. “Hm.”

“I miss her.”

Derek kept sweeping. Emily had brought something melancholy with her today. Already, everything was grayer, bleaker, more terrible. The new springtime Derek noticed was gray and ugly instead of gray and something new. Derek could feel it like he used to be able to feel the damp before it rained when he was still alive, a dull ache in the metal rod in his wrist where he’d broken it once...although now he couldn’t remember how it had happened, or how he'd broken a bone that couldn't heal. Or what it had felt like.  And the longer Emily hung there, the angrier Derek became, the more he ached; but he didn’t understand where he ached. Derek didn’t need anymore somethings. He had already carved plenty of them into the house.

“Don’t you miss someone?” Emily wondered. She floated a few inches higher.

Derek looked over at Emily and said, “There’s no one left for me to miss.”

It was true.

Emily looked grayer. “Sometimes I miss my mom. Really bad. And then when I miss her, I remember I miss Caitlin, and I just…” her lips trembled, and she flickered like a blip of static on a TV screen. “Didn’t you ever love anyone...not like your mom, but...love, love?”

Derek snorted, but then he scowled again. Derek did a lot of scowling. “Not really.” He threw away the broom to go look for the carving knife under the porch stairs. He sat on the porch with his knees to his chest and picked at the board under his right foot.

Emily clutched at her chest, like she still had a heart there, and shimmered like a weak mist.  “Why do I still love them?”

Derek forgot about testing his knife on the porch floor. He kicked at a stick. “I don’t know.” He said it so quietly, he wasn't sure she'd heard.

Emily whispered, “Sometimes I think this is worse than dying was.” She stopped talking, just for a moment before she added softly, "I hung outside Caitlin's window. You know, just for a little while. I watched her take her mom's prescription pills."A roll of thunder clapped, and Emily looked up, away from Derek, her hands clasped like some sort of saint. She had the same face, the same tortured look, like all the Jesuses Derek had ever seen etched into a church's stained glass window.

Derek sighed, and suddenly he was angry. He was angry, and the letter K was under his left foot. He let the knife slip from his fingers and kicked it away. There wasn’t anymore room left where he wanted to carve it anyway.

Suddenly he wasn’t in the mood to talk. Why did they remember? It was a good question. Derek hated thinking about it. 

“Maybe if you stopped haunting Caitlin she’d stop popping pills.” He should have regretted it. But he wouldn’t. Not until he was alone.

Emily stared at him and flickered again. She held herself, because everything that _was_ Emily was quickly disappearing. Derek stared at her, and wildly, he wondered what would happen to her if one day she just vanished. But he didn’t say anything. That part of him didn't seem to be working. Pride, his mother would have said. Don't be too proud to apologize, Derek. He only watched, and he wondered if he was afraid.

“It’s not my fault you never loved anyone,” Emily said sullenly. The something melancholy Emily had brought with her began to  break then, shatter, until it rolled with the thunder up ahead. It started to rain. Emily was nearly gone. Then she added, “Matt was right about you.”

Before Derek could grumble, _look, I’m sorry_ , Emily had disappeared. Derek watched the rain fall through him. If he thought hard enough, maybe it might roll off him like he was solid. But he was tired, tired, tired, because he’d swept the porch instead.

Derek waited.

Emily didn’t come back.

It was going to be a very bad day.

* * *

 

Derek knew Matt just like the rest of Route 49’s dead knew Matt.  Derek had spoken to Matt once. Derek didn’t like Matt, but, Matt didn’t like Derek very much either.

Then again, no one really liked Derek very much anyway.

One morning, Derek had seen Matt slipping through the wood on the edge of the property, jumping from shadow to shadow like he was playing a game of hopscotch. He looked like an imp, or Peter Pan’s shadow, swinging from redwood to redwood. He was angry at everything that moved and everyone who ever looked him in the eye, like a wild animal.

Matt belonged to the river. It had been a mean-spirited prank that left him with a white, bloated face and a bleeding mouth.

So Derek had heard anyway.

Derek caught Matt in his driveway the morning he’d first spoken to him. It had gone a little like this:

the kid was standing there with his head tilted back, hair forever wet and sticking like oil to the sides of his face. His mouth was hanging open, like a little boy looking at a skyscraper for the first time. Whenever Matt took a step, his shoes squished. He’d left a trail of wet footprints on the cement. When Derek said, “Hey!” in that rough way of his, Matt looked over at him with eyes that were too black and grinned.

“You got an ugly house,” he called, looking back to crane his neck farther. Derek sat there like a lost shadow not eaten up by the mid morning sun.

Matt laughed as Derek’s face twisted with a growling, “Get lost, kid.”

Matt kicked at a rock and sneered. He stared at it before he picked it up again, like he could feel it in his palm. Matt threw the rock into the air and caught it. Once, twice, three times. Maybe he’d played baseball before he’d died. Little League or something, because that fourth time he tossed it into the air, he threw it straight, and that rock sailed right through the only attic window left standing.

Matt whistled. Derek flinched.

“Now it matches.”

“You fucking little-!” And the whole forest watched Derek chase Matt to the edge of the driveway and never leave once. He skidded to a stop as Matt hopped over that invisible border, laughing while Derek paced and growled like a caged tiger.

Matt hopped back onto the the driveway, and off again when Derek lunged for him. “Gonna leave your porch today, Hale?” Matt cackled. “Oooo, you gonna get me? You gonna? C’mon. I’m right here. No, I’m serious now. Come on.” He laughed, rearranging the Mets hat on his head. Matt jumped over, Derek lunged forward, Matt skipped back. One, two, three, repeat. Derek never touched him. Uncle Peter would have shaken his head like it was all very boring and said something like,  _honestly, Derek._

 

Matt laughed, again and again and again. Derek stopped reaching for him and thought about why he hadn't wandered back to the porch.

 

Matt shook his head. “This is fucking brutal, man. It’s not even fun anymore, no, I’m serious, I’m serious.” He stamped one foot on the cracked driveway and left the rest of himself behind. Derek watched him, glowering. He never left the driveway, even when Matt got bored and mooned him, streaking away through the trees.

“You’re a fucking tool, Hale,” he laughed as he disappeared.

 

And that was how Derek came to know Matt.

* * *

 

When Emily disappeared, Derek knew his day was going to get worse.

And it did.

Today was the sort of day when someone even worse than Matt came nosing around the Hale property. Derek did all of his usual things: he picked at the porch, he paced the porch, he swept the porch and kept stealing backward glances at the house he didn’t feel like wandering into, and he glared at the trees as if Matt might appear. He sat down in his favorite place to think and remember, because remembering was important.

If Derek didn’t remember, what was there that was left? Some days Derek had this fear that he would forget more than what it had felt like to break a bone. And it was while he thought this, staring hard at the letter _K_ on the porch, that Maude suddenly materialized on the other side of the porch.

Today must have also been a Wednesday, because Maude only bothered to appear on days she believed were Wednesdays.

Derek didn’t like Wednesdays.

“Johnny, have you seen Kristofferson?” Maude yanked open the front door to peer inside and click her tongue. “Here, kitty, kitty!” She pulled her bathrobe around her tighter, shivering in her slippers and hair rollers.

Derek ignored her and kept trying to remember. So he closed his eyes and pretended Maude wasn’t there. It was never very long (now matter how quiet Derek kept) before Maude would notice him to her right. She had this way of glaring at Derek as if the whole world had just collapsed, and Derek was the cause of it. Her eyes disappeared into the soft folds of her wrinkles, watery and dull.

Maude hated not being seen. “Johnny, have you _seen_ Kristofferson?”

Derek sighed. He’d given up trying to correct Maude long ago. “No.” He also gave up on trying to remember and took up his pocket knife instead.

Maude didn’t leave. She watched him for a while before she said, “Johnny, be a dear and go look for him under the porch for me. You know I have bad knees and the arthritis is flaring up this morning.”

“No.”

“I’ll give you a dollar.”

Derek laughed a little. He carved deeper into the curve of the C he’d just made. “No.”

Maude glared. “Oh, alright. Five, but that’s more than you deserve.” She looked into the house again.

Derek rested his head against the porch railing. He glanced up at the sky like it had spurned him before he flicked dark eyes over Maude’s hair rollers and fuzzy Wal-Mart slippers. He sighed again, long and loud and annoyed. When someone like Maude came to visit there was only one way to make them disappear. So Derek grumbled and brushed imaginary dust off his jeans before hopping to his feet.

Maude clucked, batting at his chin with a soft, stern hand. “Stand up straight, don’t make such an awful noise at me, and look at that _face_! Keep making those faces and that handsome face’ll go to waste. Jesus, stop that glowering, you’ll scare away the birds!”

Derek jumped off the porch and got on his knees. “Good, woodpecker’s loud as shit anyway,” he muttered.

“What was that, Johnny? Don’t sass me, boy!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Derek called from under the porch.

“Atta boy. Kristofferson? Kristofferson! Come out, you naughty kitty! Well? What are you waiting for? Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little dirt. Put some more effort into it and get your ass under that porch, Johnny, before I tell your mother I saw you smoking dope with that girl.”

Derek grimaced and army-crawled deeper under the porch. “Kristofferson!” he called, reluctantly. Under his breath he added, “Come out, come out, wherever you are, you little bastard.”

“Oh, Kristofferson! Kristofferson! Where _are_ you?” Maude cried.

Derek kept pretending to look until he knew Maude had flitted away, forgetting him altogether in the search for her cat. Derek was fine with that. Maude had too much dirt on Johnny.

If Derek ever met Johnny, he was going to punch him in the face.

But Derek’s day _still_ could have been worse.

And it was.

Derek saw her gliding across the lawn a moment too late. Maybe he’d spent too much time reflexively brushing off dirt that wasn’t there. Derek saw Cora roll her eyes when he disappeared and materialized on the porch, slipping through a wall. It was stupid, really. It didn’t matter if Cora couldn’t see him. She would come for him anyway.

“Oh, come on!” she hollered.

Derek didn’t answer. Instead, he closed the front door, like closing it would actually _do_ something.

The front door flew open a moment later, and Derek’s younger sister Cora stomped into the foyer like she’d forgotten how to be dead.

“I _mean_ it, Derek, this has gotta stop. You can’t lock yourself in here forever!” She spotted him near the stairs, but he let himself go again, until he was nothing but mist and particles racing through the house, looking for a place to settle.

Derek materialized in the kitchen and backed into someone soft.

“She’s right, you know.”

Derek cursed, tilting his head to look up into the smug, still clean-shaven face of his uncle, Peter.

 

“God _damn_ it, Cora!”

 **  
** And just like that, the Hale house was alive again. In the grimmest way possible.

 


	3. Hale of a Family Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You don't belong here anymore. No one does."

“Oh, Derek,” said Uncle Peter, and he said this like he said most things that were meant to cut: low and gravelly, with a laugh in his voice, “you’ve really let the place go.”

 

Derek watched his uncle drag a thumb along the kitchen sink. These were the sort of things Uncle Peter liked to do. Peter was a smudged streak of gray and bobbing white teeth, a smile that had long ago ripped itself apart from his hollow-eyed skull. Peter blew the dust from his thumb and laughed, nearly disappearing in the afternoon gloom.

 

Derek hunched. His mother might have said something like, “You'll know when Derek’s angry. He'll stand there like a gargoyle.” And that is exactly how Derek stood. And maybe that was exactly how Derek looked: like a gargoyle, waiting for the others around him to remember turn back into stone. His shoulders drooped forward, his jaw jutted out with a scowl that wrinkled his brow, and he’d stuffed his hands in his pockets. He was bracing himself, like he’d seen Emily do so many times, and he didn’t flinch, not once, when Peter drifted through him, like the dust twirling away from the sink.

 

“You know, I myself was an introvert,” mused Peter, “once upon a time.”

 

You should never believe everything Uncle Peter says. Derek had learned this the hard way. He turned away from his uncle, sinking into a loping shadow.

 

Cora came together like wisps of smoke under the kitchen archway. “Leave him alone, Peter.” She looked younger than Derek had last seen her. Or maybe it was just him, noticing her. The house frightened Cora, and she kept looking down hallways and into corners. She hugged her She-Ra t-shirt and disappeared again.

 

Peter disappeared and reappeared in another corner of the kitchen. Then again at Derek’s side. Cora went from one room to another, silent and angry.

 

“Looks like it’s going to be a party,” laughed Uncle Peter, and Derek looked out the window. He leaned over the counter and snarled.

 

“No. I don’t need you! Go away!”

 

They didn’t listen. They arrived in a shimmering ghostly procession. Hales who never slept. They glided past him and through him. They fell through the ceiling and pushed past the door, politely, like they hadn’t forgotten living manners. They flitted through the house, talking and gossiping and sometimes laughing, other times crying, and one time howling. The house seemed to glow.

 

Derek didn’t move from his spot by the window. He hung his head..

 

“You know what I could go for, right now?” Uncle Peter grinned again, with that glow-in-the-dark smile, and Derek didn’t have to tell him  _no, I don’t_ , because Peter chuckled and said, “Not too many guesses at once.”

 

The floor above their heads creaked. Cora was in her bedroom. Derek hunched his shoulders. Voices drifted from the basement. Someone said, “It really does look different from what I last remember!”

 

“I think,” and Peter swept his arms in a grand gesture, “that I would love a little champagne. Maybe something expensive. Now that we’re all here.” His smile was wicked in the dark.

 

Derek growled, “Fuck you, Peter,” and Peter’s smile widened. Sharp and dangerous. The rest of him faded away until only his smile remained.

 

Derek flickered. He stooped. Derek thought of Matt on the driveway, saying, _you’re a fucking tool, Hale._

 

“Cut it out, Peter.” Cora appeared in the kitchen again, and the others, except for Great Aunt Marcella, seemed to remember that this wasn’t a ghastly party meant to entertain the family by recounting just how, and where, they all died.

 

Emily would have liked it, Derek thought with a roll of his eyes, and he wondered where she was wandering.

 

Because death was a very important pastime for a ghost, Great Aunt Marcella was still talking about hers. Derek groaned, looking for a place to hide as she glided down the hall. "I mean, really," she huffed, "who _dies_ like that? He _must_ be lying." She was incensed that the man down the row from her grave at the cemetery had died in a horrific freak accident that had probably only happened to less than one percent of the population as far as anyone else knew.

 

Derek pressed himself against the wall as she passed until he nearly disappeared. Aunt Marcella didn't see him.

 

“And, if I remember correctly,” continued Aunt Marcella loudly, and she sauntered through the hall into the kitchen with five cousins and a great-great uncle behind her, “I died there, right there, and-Peter. _Peter!_ You’re ruining my memory.”

 

Peter looked back, but his eyes settled on Derek, who scowled at him. Peter grinned and looked away. “Oh. It’s you. Hello, Marcella.” He didn’t move. Aunt Marcella fretted.

 

“Oh! You always were a rude boy, Peter. Shoo!” She walked through him, recounting her horrific tale of what it had been like to burn alive. Peter rolled his eyes. Derek shrank away.

 

More Hales came, and Derek sighed. Some had been dead longer than others.

 

“I’m in the wrong place,” said Derek’s great-great-grandfather, and he squinted into the kitchen, scratching his hairy ears. “Shit. I’m haunting the wrong place again.” While he stared, Derek fled from the corner he'd been hiding in.

 

"Who's there?" his grandfather growled. "Am I haunting the wrong place again?"

 

Derek didn’t bother correcting him. "Damn kids," his grandfather muttered. Derek materialized in the living room, disappearing with a surprised growl when he was met with warm smiles and concerned looks.

 

This was was a ghostly intervention.

 

Or maybe a reunion. Derek hadn't decided yet.

 

The storm outside ignored the Hales, and rainwater dripped through the holes in the ceiling until each ghost looked like a steam of hot breath misting through the chilled spring rain.

 

Derek slipped into a wall, trying not to remember them. Someone was already on the porch when he wandered outside, and he sneered. It was a face he vaguely remembered. Some second cousin whose name he couldn’t recall.

 

“Get lost,” Derek growled, but his cousin only bared his teeth in a challenge. Not in the mood to fight, Derek angrily reappeared inside the house. Cora noticed.

 

“DEREK!” Cora shouted, and the how-are-you’s and how-long’s-it-been-again’s stopped. Derek cursed. He started slipping through a wall again.

 

“Don’t!” Cora warned. She had her hands on her hips. The others waited and watched. Peter grinned.

 

It was quiet. The afternoon rain kept its thunder.

 

“Don’t,” Cora repeated, softer this time, and Derek paused. He stopped sifting through the wall and opened his eyes. He scowled, and he looked disembodied, with his head sticking out of the wall, through a bubbled picture frame, to growl at them all.

 

“I don’t need your help.”

 

Cora’s face fell, and Derek was reminded of how small she was (twelve, he reminded himself. Only twelve), and he nearly disappeared out of shame. He wouldn’t look at her, or he’d remember. Things like: her eyes were brown, like their mother’s. She used to have this fear the world would end before she could have her braces removed.

 

And it had.

 

“You can’t,” Cora paused, her round face twisting with a frown, “you can’t stay here forever. There are other places you should be.”

 

Derek laughed. But it wasn’t really a laugh, it was more of a disbelieving snort. “There’s nowhere else for me to be.”

 

And there wasn’t. Emily knew this. Even Aunt Marcella knew this.

 

Derek said, “It’s my haunt,” like that was all the explanation anyone needed.

 

Someone murmured, “a deathbed is hard to leave.”

 

“But you’re alone.” Cora looked up at him. Hugged herself tighter. She didn’t want to be there. The house was slowly sucking her away. Derek wished she would leave. His resolve broke.

 

“It's okay. I don’t get scared.” He said it softly, quietly, just for her to hear. I don’t get scared, he’d tell her, when they were alive and younger, running through the woods when the sun began to dip and sink, splashing the evening red. She’d wine when the dark crept over. Cora was eight. Derek was twelve.

 

But she ran with him when the moon rose. I don’t get scared, he’d told her. you shouldn’t either. I’m right behind you. He remembered Cora running through the trees with lanky arms and skinny legs. He remembered she bounded through dead leaves and when she landed, she hit the ground on padded black paws.

 

Wolves ruled the wood then.

 

Not anymore.

 

Cora tucked her hair behind her ears. Her anger kept her rooted to the house. She unhooked her arms. Derek thought he could see the points of her canines when she spoke. “Then if you miss us so much, why aren’t you with us?”

 

The others whispered.

 

Peter shook his head like it was a pity. But he spoke like it wasn’t a pity at all. “Really, Derek. Hasn’t this charade gone on long enough?”

 

Derek glowered.

 

There were murmurs. More whispers. Cora looked away from Derek. Derek never stopped watching her. He stayed behind the wall, like a wall mount held high for everyone to look at and talk about and shake their heads over.

 

“It wasn’t his fault.”

 

“Well. He shouldn’t have been fooling around with older women. If he’d been a little older, a little more experienced, he might’ve been able to sniff out an Argent like a bloodhound.”

 

“Nobody blames you, Derek.”

 

“Come with us.”

 

“We miss you.”

 

“Everyone misses you, Derek.”

 

“You don’t belong here anymore. No one does.”

 

“You can’t stay here forever,” Cora echoed, and then she was gone, before Derek could say, _wait_.

 

The Hales hung in the rain, watching Derek in the wall. Derek didn’t look at them.

 

“As I was saying, before Peter rudely interrupted,” continued Aunt Marcella, loudly as always, and she drifted away, pulling morbidly curious cousins and uncles and aunts with her.

 

Her voice lilted down the hallway until it was swallowed by thunder and she vanished.

 

“Derek,” whispered the others. One by one, like candles dying on their wicks, they left, until it was only Peter. He smiled like the Cheshire cat.

 

Peter said, “Ciao. Don’t forget all the dust in the kitchen.”

 

Derek snarled, leaping out of the wall. "GET OUT!"

 

Peter left before his fanged smile did.


End file.
